Out of Chaos
by Aenigmatic
Summary: They think they've finally found the one behind a string of murders. Only a psychiatrist utilising experimental technology can hope to uncover the truth behind these killings, until she learns that her prisoner isn't quite the man she thinks he is and that the psyche hides more than she can ever imagine of the world around her. AU.
1. Chapter 1

**Out of Chaos**

**Summary:** _They think they've finally found the one behind a string of murders. Only a psychiatrist utilising experimental technology can hope to uncover the truth behind these killings, until she learns that her prisoner isn't quite the man she thinks he is and that the psyche hides more than she can ever imagine of the world around her. Set before Thor (the first movie), but incorporates events from all three movies (Thor, The Avengers and Thor: The Dark World) in no order. AU._  
**Rating:** _T/M (for brutal violence and possible sexual situations)_  
**Author's notes:** _Inspired by a prompt found here, but the story has taken a life of its own and a different direction as I wrote it. As with all my stories, every one is an experiment in style and form. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Characterisation here however, is stretched to the point of believability but I hope I'll do all our favourite characters justice by the time this ends. _  
**Disclaimer:** _No copyright infringement intended. _

* * *

**Prologue**

The woman falls forward with a dull thud into the coarse sand. Her body is cleaved through the middle and brutally disembowelled, divided messily in half as though executed by the bluntest of blades and the shakiest of hands. A distance away, a head crowned in scarlet flame lolls to a stop by the jagged edge of an escarpment.

A flash of white teeth is the only sign of exhausted satisfaction from the man who stands over the body that shudders its last sigh.

Loki Odinson staggers towards the outcropping of rocks as the muted winter sun creeps across the horizon and tightens his hold on the twin daggers in his hand. Blood drips liberally from them, marring the yellow and brown plains with the odd spots of red and black.

There's an incessant buzz in his ear that rises to a booming crescendo, fracturing the stillness of the dawn with an ear-piercing shriek that scatters the critters of the night in several directions.

He hates that noise. It spins around him like a dream, unmooring the last shred of reason that his mind clings onto and strands him in the tumultuous ocean of doubt and broken memories.

The sudden pain in his ear causes his grip on the dagger to loosen. Like the body, it falls to the ground, its sharp edge vertically hitting the mud like a whisper through pursed lips as its owner claps a bloody hand over his ear in a futile bid to stop the noise.

His hand comes away tingling with sticky warmth. He looks and sees that the tips of his fingers stained with blood. His own. In the dim light, how easy it would be to imagine that it's not the heated red of his people, but the treacherous black of a distant enemy.

Maybe it's touch that brings dawning awareness of the throbbing bruises that his body carries. It drives him momentarily to his knees as the thick trunk of a fallen tree provides meagre support for a lacerated back.

Pain is of no relevance. Only the purpose is. One that is fated to last.

Where is the rest for the weary, who are miles away from home? But there is no home, is there? Or at least, the second son of Odin doesn't allow himself to even entertain the fuzzy notions of _home_. Notions of gilded halls and laughter and marvellous vistas, shredded into bits on the shore of a consciousness that still clings desperately to life.

He takes a brief sniff of the decaying air. It's slightly resinous, mossy, with an underlying stench that he's learned to pick up after spending time in their all too _fragrant_ company. The scent of fear and loathing is found in every panting breath that intangibly heats up the cold, dusky gusts of wind that whistle through the ailing branches of the ancient, dying forest.

A massive shadow obscures the rising sun and Loki is up on his feet in an instant. He whirls around without hesitation and slams the last dagger in his hand unerringly in his assailant's heart. Like the woman before her, this one crumples with a shriek that dies as a hoarse cry in her throat. He follows her down and drops to his knees, keeping his grip on the dagger steady, then drags the knife through bone, muscle and sinew.

As an obedient servant to a ruthless master, the blade does its work efficiently as it did on his last victim. Twisting, shredding, cutting on a smooth path rendered crooked only by the occasional tremble that runs through his body.

She's dead. He's made sure of it.

But the dead can come back to life and those who live as humans show too much steel. It is a lesson he'd had to learn the hard way.

He never makes the same mistake twice. The dagger glints again when he raises his arm.

The last and the hardest cut is reserved for the woman's throat. A head capped with short, spiky dark hair sails through the air in an arc of splattering blood as it joins its neighbour in the next second.

Blessed silence follows the dull thud of the bouncing head, punctuated only by the harsh cawing of an ever-watchful crow hidden in the trees. Loki straightens and sheaths his daggers in the folds of his clothes.

They disappear into a pocket dimension, winking out of existence with a thought.

Then he heads west, away from the brightening sky, eager to shield himself in the waning darkness that the new dawn has already cast away as a forgotten memory.

They are coming for him, just as he is coming for them.

Twenty-three and counting.

And he will slice their throats dry. He will destroy every single one of them when he finds them until they are naught but grains of sand in the desert and soil on the damp forest ground. The vow that he makes to himself falters like a sharp slap to the face when he strains to call together the healing warmth of depleted magic from a core that had been hollowed out and emptied not too long ago.

Lost in his musings, Loki is surprised when his feet bring him to the edge of a fast-flowing stream. He washes his injuries in it, allowing the frigid swirls to calm his body. He briefly entertains the idea of sustenance only to shake it off when the long rays of the sun begin to touch the gentle banks of the stream. There's sufficient game in the forest to feed a warrior tribe comfortably, but as tempting as it is, the cover of darkness is preferable for hunting. Yet the encroaching brightness of the morning will hinder this thankless task.

His body is calling for rest, the cuts, aches and bruises staying unhealed as long as he gives himself to this mission that he has vowed to complete. But hadn't he gone without sustenance and recuperation in the ceaseless campaigns that had been launched against the enemies over the millennia?

After every skirmish, the only reminders that he would have had of these encounters would have been the scars that his skin cannot seem to relinquish. Many of them had been marks of honour, of initiation. Loki hadn't given them too much thought before; instead, he'd borne them with a measure of pride and hastily-cast illusions as disguise if the occasion had called for it.

It's not in his makeup to entertain the possibility of defeat. Shorn of the magical core that is knitted tight into the marrow of his bones, there's nothing he has left on his person but his wits and his weapons. And without the comforting buffer that his magic provides, there is nothing to stop the rising tide of a deeper, intangible horror that has seared a burgeoning – and revolting – consciousness _his own_ family had thoughtlessly sought to repress.

So the nightmares come. Flashes of an incoherent story that bleed into reality, the detritus of an unwanted life that floats on an endless sea. Laughter that turns into monstrous howls and the merriment of feasting that morphs into chains and torture. It's all blue frost and icy on this wretched plane of existence and he cannot escape it, even when the sun is warm and inviting and shining brightly on his face as he stands on the shimmering rainbow bridge of the Realm Eternal.

When Loki jerks awake with a shuddering breath, he's more than thankful that his only companions are trees and the dissipating mist. He stumbles towards the stream, kneels in the soil and shoves his hands into the cold water that ripples around his fingers. The water hits his parched throat a second later and a laboured sigh escapes him.

He stays kneeling in that position until he thinks he can stand without falling.

The last time he tried this, he hadn't woken up for a week.

In the last hour that he spent drifting in and out of awareness, the smallest curl of magic had unfurled itself in his gut. Now it reacts instantaneously to other sources of magic so far-flung in this barren realm called Midgard, sending a fine buzz along the surface of his skin that's a heady breath of fresh air blowing over a suffocating soul. The shadow of a tired smile faintly stretches the corner of his mouth. How tempting it would be to allow his magic and its propensity to heal simply take its course within his body. To do so however, would be to waste precious time and resources that he simply does not have.

Instead, he uses that brief, returning flow of power as a pathfinder.

Indiscernible shapes and whirring silhouettes coalesce into a fixed point of resonance, like ripples in a pond stilling long enough to reveal the water's true depth and its buried secrets.

It tells him what he needs to know. His next kill. Where he must go.

Arresting its kinetic flow midway, Loki tears open a minute pathway of travel and teleports away from the forest, depleting himself fully once again.

**oOo**

The short walk uphill along a path striated by the yellow lamps lining the street takes him only a minute. A small building stands at its crest, a derelict old thing that isn't fit to house any living being.

It rings a discordant note even in the recesses of his own muddled memories. Is Midgard so changed? Had there been any truth then, to the grandiose stories of Midgardian battles and wars that had been told to him in his childhood? Battles that had even whetted the appetite of those who lived in the Realm Eternal?

A few seconds pass as he tries to sift the past from the present, straining to remember. Clarity filters sluggishly through when he takes a downward look at the soft and flimsy material that adorns his body. It isn't the black and green leather garb that he favours, but a poor imitation of what one can construe to be mortal garments.

This isn't the Midgard of old, drawn in the large, gilded books of the library he has spent too much time in. There are metropolises so bright now that they mar the night sky, a thousand mutually incomprehensible languages and dialects that they'd made his head spin. Where anonymity was prized and simultaneously denied in the frantic mix of activity, anxiety and sheer speed. No, this is the Midgard that has strayed from the old gods, whose inhabitants are too quick to label the inexplicable as the irrational.

Loki takes a sharp glance around and steps forward to the apartment's entrance. The front door opens without any effort when he twists its handle. The faded blue carpet of the interior is torn in places, leading to a staircase that goes up and up.

He takes the winding stairs carefully, pausing only to look at the tiny, dirty window that seemed to have been constructed as an afterthought. Outside, the world turns in oblivion. He watches a group of giggling girls hurry past, their thick coats pulled tight over their flushed cheeks, then turns his eyes to an old man who hobbles along the street. The sounds they make fade into the distance. Further yet, a woman leisurely with her partner, tightly clutching his arm as though she fears losing him to the slightest smile from another.

All of them hold the potential of being so much more than what their exteriors really reveal – a challenge that anonymity always presents.

Not too long ago, Loki would have said that he relished challenges in all its forms.

The long corridor upstairs is lined with dark brown wooden doors. The décor doesn't look any different from those in his previous kills. A copy of a copy…of a copy. The interiors are dull, uninspired with highly restrictive views of the exterior. Or perhaps it is the nature of Midgardian living spaces in this age.

Loki stops. Something is amiss. Like the stars blotted out from the endless expanse sky, like the mighty rushing great river whose flow is reversed.

There's life within these walls. Stinking life. A particular abomination that he has to extinguish, that he needs to wipe out from the face of all the realms.

The fourth door from the end of the corridor is ajar, a wedge of daylight shining through its gap. To him, it's a subtle invitation, a planned trap. That same screeching noise that had been present in the forest now assaults his ears.

The static shadows morph in an instant. A dark shape materialises from the corner where wallpaper peels off in rings.

He whips to face it straight on.

But the air is curiously emptied of tangible things, and dense with unspoken threat.

Instead, he hears a small, fragile voice from the dark corner where he thought the shadow once was. "Who's there?"

The voice is neither masculine nor feminine, but a gnarly thing that hints of age and incapacitation.

Loki's fists clench involuntarily when he catches a glimpse of the speaker. In his feverish haze, it looks as though the elderly crippled bears an uncanny resemblance to Odin Borson stripped of his Asgardian powers. With greying hair and beard, an elderly man shakes and trembles in a wheelchair with an eye that has already been misted over by a thin white film.

A helpless being who has shrugged off his coat of majesty. Or rather, evil in the disguise of a helpless being.

Loki doesn't deign to answer. Talk is wasted on the undeserving.

The spent magic in his core trembles as it tries to rebuild itself, then fades mutely into frustrating dormancy – a pattern that is painfully routine by now. The kills, followed by the hollowing out of his energy reserves that he'd once arrogantly thought limitless, regenerating enough only to be depleted after each teleportation when he seeks a new target to hunt. Rinse and repeat. An unending cycle...until his mission is complete. At this rate, he'd be at it for the next few millennia and counting.

"Who's there?"

The voice repeats the question, turning beseeching, needy. A potent weapon calculated to arouse pity and sympathy, designed to stumble a murderous nature.

Fighting to keep mounting uncertainty and the pressing blackness of panic at bay, Loki pulls his daggers into his hands and shifts his focus to the deep-seated intuition that had brought him to this very place, this very time. His breaths turn ragged, uneven. But the sudden flash of heat and pain in his abdomen, honed so finely along the rim of his consciousness that it's hard to tell whether it's imagined or real, throws his usual assured gait into disarray.

The briefest shadow of movement stirs him into action.

Propelled by sharp, jagged edge of memory, the blade flashes as he swings it downwards, leaving a dark stain to congeal on the peeling walls. As he had done with his other kills, muscle and sinew are ripped through until flesh, skin and bone form an unrecognisable mess on the wooden floor. The body falls limply out of the wheelchair and the head follows, rolling to a stop when it hits the corner of the room.

The ceiling spins as Loki falls to his knees, a hand going automatically to his left side where he feels the warmth of his own blood staining his ruined shirt. The trickle of blood is turning into a red river that runs down the length of his torso. Briefly, he stares at his own bloodied hand in confusion, wondering how he'd come by that injury.

He realises that he doesn't quite know. Without the intuitive sense that his magic had always given him, he's just another blind man on the street.

Then the adrenaline wears off, replaced by the searing burn that creeps in where the injured spot is.

_When had this happened? _

The surroundings are becoming a grey haze of indistinct shadows, a product of blurring vision and increasing mental incoherence. His legs move of their own accord as his lungs gulp in the heavy, muggy air of a fog that's rolling in.

He had been a hairsbreadth of stepping into Valhalla's glorious hall before but has never walked into it. He'd welcome it now.

Maybe this might be his third time lucky.

Eventually, the pain drives him into the street and beyond. It's a hundred metres down the road when he sees the first signs of urban decay that encircles the city centre, and another hundred when the crowds start to gather. They point, first, with some curiosity, and then in surprise and then in panic.

He sways on his feet and fights to keep himself upright, every muscle screaming in protest.

The world rotates, affixed to a horizontal plane comprised of blurry shapes that look like flailing human limbs. All around, Loki sees the a swarm of faces that look down on-

Look _down_?

It's then that he realises he has fallen onto the hard, concrete ground, his hand still clutching his bleeding side. There are voices now, a labyrinthine maze of sounds and frequencies that he cannot pull apart and separate in his addled mind.

But all he can think of is the remaining number of kills he needs to make. There're more of them to hunt…yet there's nowhere to go. What is laid before him? A string of dead ends and a plethora of clues that lead everywhere and nowhere.

He could go on for weeks, months and maybe even years and not find what he wants.

Exhaustion, weighed down by these gloomy predictions, saps away his last bit of strength. As formidable as his will is, it's no match for leaden limbs and a head in which truths and falsehoods freely tangle and turn reality into distorted lines.

The last thought before the darkness claims him is that his mission is as good as gone.


	2. Chapter 2

The cell had been passably transformed into a hospital ward. Windowless, bullet-proof, lit with two rows of fluorescent lights, its dark grey walls seem to hem in the doctor who is hunched over a clipboard at the foot of the bed. Trenton Corey scribbles out something, then checks his reading against the previous day's ones. With a nod of satisfaction, he tucks the clipboard snugly back at the foot of the bed.

Mr. X, as the patient is known among the medical staff, hadn't taken a turn for the worse.

But neither had he taken a turn for the better in the time he'd been delivered to the emergency room, only to have gotten himself whisked off again to a secret facility that had impressive medical equipment to keep people alive.

With a last look at the figure lying motionless in the cot surrounded by the number of machines that monitor his vital signs in a series of fluctuating waves and numbers, Corey leaves the room and walks into an adjacent one where two agents dressed in black wait for him.

The first is a woman with hair the colour of the falling autumn leaves, curled so that it falls softly against her ears and cheek. Corey thinks that her beauty undiminished even with the hard expression on her face. From the stern set of her lips to her glassy eyes, she looks as though she is carved out of granite, as is the man next to her who has the same wary look on his face as she does. They're both decked out in leather with accents of grey, silver and red, and he wonders – not for the first time – about their intense interest in the comatose figure on the bed.

As far as Corey knows, his patient – a man in a _vegetative_ state – is a wanted man, a dangerous criminal who cannot be warded in the local hospital for the risks he presents. Dangerous enough to warrant the presence of two imposing and recognisable figures who carry the burdened fame of being Earth's Avengers.

Corey's brows furrow sceptically. Mr. X is so bruised that it was a surprise to see that he had even been alive and walking on the street before he had collapsed and been hauled off to the nearest hospital by some kind-hearted soul.

When Mr. X had arrived, he'd nothing on him but the clothes on his back. No identity, no money, no fancy gadgets which they could use to track his relations. But years of doctor's instinct say that Mr. X is not the typical, run-of-the-mill tramp that sleeps on the streets with newspapers as his bed of roses.

"Doctor, how badly injured is he?"

A curt voice interrupts his ruminations on the mystery of Mr. X.

Curt, straight to the point. Something he should have expected from the female agent who seems to be carved straight from granite.

_Badly_, Corey wants to say. The team of doctors sent to work on him had thought he was going to bleed his life out on the operating table.

But he knows what they are really asking about.

Corey straightens unconsciously as though she'd called his credentials into question. He manages a straight face as he answers, "It will be sometime before he regains consciousness."

"That wasn't my question, Dr-" The redhead glances once at his nametag. "-Dr. Corey."

"Injured enough to be placed under a medically-induced coma, Ms. Romanov," he answers crisply as he turns to the glass that separates the holding room from the cell to flick a glance at Mr. X. It's on the tip of his tongue to say that his patient looks more like a victim than a perpetrator, but he doesn't.

Natasha Romanov's pursed lips provide him with the only visible clue of her annoyance.

Corey licks his lips once and continues pointedly, "We're looking at fractured ribs, internal bleeding from sternal fracture, a fresh stab wound, multiple bruises in the joints, partially-healed contusions in the head that point to previous episodes of head trauma. And the list of other superficial injuries goes on. It's a wonder that he's still alive."

"But he is alive," the other agent called Clint Barton says brusquely. "And that's all that matters."

_It's more than that,_ Corey wants to say. If the patient's physiology bears any resemblance to any ordinary human being's, that is where the apparent similarity ends.

"What else can you tell us about him?"

Corey eyes the patient once. "A CT-scan is scheduled later today. We're still awaiting the results of the patient's blood work but preliminary tests show..." he paused, wondering how he could possibly put the news across without sounding like an absolute crock.

An emotion resembling curiosity breaks through Barton's steely eyes. "Show what?"

"We're looking at a completely new blood type," Corey replies in a whoosh of a breath. "Medically speaking, it's impossible. His body is healing itself at a rapid rate, but he remains very weak still, which suggests the sheer amount of energy required for him to function normally. And his core-" he breaks off and shakes his head once, "-his core is like an entity of its own, more closely tied to his subconscious than we've ever seen before. We're still trying to find a logical explanation for this."

The two agents exchange a weighty, significant glance that Corey doesn't miss.

He hears a sharp exhale from his right.

"It's at this point in time I need to remind you that all of your findings are highly classified," Romanov says coolly.

Corey tries to wave off his annoyance at the agents' patronising ways. Seven years of working for this particular, secretive arm of S.H.I.E.L.D. and he finishes every case none the wiser. The agents flit through this place like ghosts in the night, checking up on their chosen wards ever so often. And then they're gone and he never sees any of them again.

Mr. X's situation however, isn't shaping up to be a typical case that the doctors encounter daily.

"Of course," Corey answers easily. "Every report is encrypted and stored in the database, accessible exclusively to the medical staff treating him. Clearance is only given to the select few handlers of this case."

Romanov looks at her partner steadily, though Corey suspects her words aren't just for Barton's ears alone. "Then you know what is at stake here. We aren't looking at an ordinary serial killer. We need him awake as soon as he's able to-"

"Time and patience are needed right now," Corey interrupts Romanov flatly. He reminds himself that his first priority is as always, the health of his patients and not their deeds. Placed under such subtle pressure from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s agents, he actually manages to forget sometimes why doctors do what they do.

Barton tries to speak, but Corey barrels ahead.

"During this time, patients can die, recover fully or, in rare cases, slip into a vegetative or a minimally conscious state. And although it has been documented that brain activity measured in coma patients with minimal consciousness isn't completely halted, I wouldn't do recommend anything yet to reverse this state-"

"Our primary goal is to speak to him, Dr. Corey. To find out as much as we can about those murders. And we know that-"

"That will only happen when he's sufficiently well to do so," he says firmly. "If and when it happens."

"I wouldn't expect you to understand, Corey. The information that this patient has is time-critical." Barton shifts minutely in annoyance, stilled only by Romanov's calming hand on his forearm.

Romanov looks at him steadily. "Dr. Corey, we need some leads but we prefer your willing corporation. Do what you need to do so. Remember what's important."

_Wake him by any means necessary. _

Corey reads between the lines easily, understanding the hidden threat that simmers below that calm exterior. They'd been expecting him to treat Mr. X as the doctors try to treat all their criminal patients here – as anonymous bodies that require patching up so that they could be carted away to face the kind of justice that will meted out without trial. By doing so, the patient would be reduced to a case number and forgotten in the archives as the years go by, an artificially-simplified variable in a complex equation where shades of grey are erased by hard lines delineating the good and the bad.

It's a prickly situation to be caught in – and the part of his job that he hates.

Pursing his lips once, Corey considers his options, which aren't that many. Naïveté and the desperate lack of money had made him sign across that dotted line all those years ago and he was now bound to honour the restrictive contract, whether he liked it or not.

The pointed clearing of a throat makes Corey realise that he'd been lost in his own musings for longer than he'd liked. Taking a deep breath, he makes them wait a little longer while he mentally files through his own scant knowledge of practicing physicians specialising in brain trauma rehabilitation. As far as he knows, there are experimental technologies dealing with neurological cartography and synaptic transfer, most of which would not even live to see the official stamp of an approved patent. But while such technology had also been hailed as a miracle, there are many others who have resolutely written off the capability of comatose patients of communicating at all.

But since they pushed for progress…

Perhaps there isn't too much harm in recommending them a certain alternative that he has vaguely read about in some medical journal. It would even go some way to help soothe his own pricked conscience.

Corey feels around his pocket for a pen with hands shakier than normal. He scribbles out an address and a name and hands it to the woman.

"What about a compromise, Agent Romanov?"

**oOo**

The entourage comes on a typical workday in the neurosurgical ward when Jane Foster is making minute tweaks to her virtual machine in the surgical room.

They're dark shapes in black – distinct and unpleasant blotches on the placid, pastel colours of the hospital – like the clichés seen too often in the movies. Panic crests in the first ten seconds, then ebbs away, replaced by indignation as they enter her office without knocking. As affronted as she is by the efficient and brusque manner in which they've swept into a private space as though they own it, she wonders if it's too much to hope that they'll conclude their business as painlessly as possible.

It isn't the first time that they've been here.

Seven months ago, she'd watched with some curiosity from her office window as black SUVs screeched into the driveway of the hospital, dislodging the ambulances from their waiting spots. Official government agents, her colleagues had said, on some top-secret mission that only a select few hear about, involving a particular patient warded here. The agents had rushed into the entrance and reappeared fifteen minutes later with a woman still strapped to a cot, the machines beeping out her stats in numbers and squiggly lines. The purple glint of a necklace reflecting off the patient's neck was how Jane had realised that it was Bernice Leitha they were taking away, a twenty-five year-old woman with whom she had only started work. By the time her feet had taken her to the main entrance, all that had remained of Bernice were the tyre marks crunched in the gravel by the SUVs.

Two days later, Bernice's obituary had appeared in the local papers, a small rectangle cut the bottom corner of the page. She'd only seen it because the saucer of her morning coffee had coincidentally snagged a fold there.

The shock had come like a bucketful of cold water in her face.

That these people had thought their business a priority over medical emergencies had left more than a flaky, revolting taste in her mouth.

But the fuller picture only came a month later. It hadn't occurred to her that Bernice was linked to several terrorist cells in the Middle East until an overheard snippet of a conversation one day in the ladies' bathroom had let that discreet piece of information slip.

Whether that had been rumour or fact, Jane doesn't know to this day. Their presence simply makes her edgy and apprehensive, but never would she have imagined that they'd be looking for her instead of her patients. Her small, short glimpse of the shadow world in which S.H.I.E.L.D. and its operatives function had been an unwelcome jolt of reality that is proving to be as surreal as the twisted dreamscapes that she waded through daily.

Now that they're here, Jane gets the distinct feeling that her orderly world comprising routine, virtual testing and rehabilitation is set on a spectacular collision course with their shadowy one.

"I hope you're not a secret criminal, Dr. Foster."

Jane throws a mock-annoyed look at her Swedish intern. Sigrid is as cool as a Scandinavian woman can get (and looks unfairly _modelesque_ in hospital scrubs), with a dry sense of humour that's quirky to brighten up an awful day. That is, when Jane actually manages to understand the obscure jokes that seem to revolve around Swedish parliamentary seats and their nosy Norwegian neighbours.

She walks to the window where Sigrid is standing and looks at the SUVs parked haphazardly by the curb.

"I wonder what's going to happe-"

Jane jumps a little when the knock on the door echoes loudly in the room. It opens before she can say 'enter'.

"Good day, Dr. Foster."

The thinly-veiled politeness in the greeting is a veneer, as always.

A loose wire that tabulates her patient's latest readings dangles from the side of the computer. Brushing a stray lock behind her ear, Jane takes her time hooking it back where it belongs before turning slowly to face the first agent clad in a dark suit.

"I'll be alright, Sigrid," she says and gestures vaguely to the machines. "I'll take it from here."

Shooting her a quick but nuanced look of disbelief, her intern nods once and slinks away, shutting the door quietly behind her.

Jane suppresses an inward sigh. A dozen, impolite phrases run through her mind before she tries for a stiff and neutral greeting. As wary as she is of the shadowy presence of these agents, her curiosity never fails to betray her.

"How can I help you?"

"Bluntly put, we are in need of your expertise."

Whatever she'd been expecting, it certainly isn't this. "You don't mince words, do you? What do you mean?"

"Your work with nonresponsive coma patients has been outstanding," the agent says and pauses. "We have a case that requires your input."

Concise, straight to the point. But that statement is also reductive and obscure, lacking the necessary context that would explain this personal house call.

Jane shrugs once. "You could always transfer your patient here. He or she will be put under my care and there's a special section of wards that has been recently set up to accommodate th-"

The agent's lips curve sardonically as he stops her mid-sentence. "I'm afraid that's impossible, Dr. Foster. The security here is-" he looks pointedly around,"-sadly lacking. Even in those wards you've talked about."

"It's a hospital, not a prison," she says in exasperation.

The agent raises a brow, affirming her candid observation. "Precisely."

Just played into that one, she thinks ruefully. But the mild condescension she's hearing in his voice grates on her nerves nonetheless.

"I assume you're expecting me to pack my bags, leave everything and come with you?"

"Along with your equipment, of course. Relocation costs will be fully covered, as would the transportation of everything that is necessary for you to work. I can also assure you that you will be compensated satisfactorily. This is not a permanent assignment but it will take as long as it needs. Your place here is guaranteed, should you wish to return."

_Should she wish to return?_

Her original question, Jane notices with some bewilderment, had been too easily sidestepped.

She blinks once, twice, letting the words sink in. Suddenly she understands the allure of the web of secrecy that they weave, built on layer upon layer of gossamer strings of secrets and vague promises that have the power to ensnare.

"So this is a job offer?"

"Of a sort."

"Assuming I do take this, where are you taking me? Who exactly, am I expected to treat? If you're not telling me this now-"

A white, unmarked folder is shoved onto her worktable. "The non-disclosure forms are here, awaiting your signature. I suspect that you already know that this assignment is highly classified – as are the all of the things we handle. Sign where the dotted line is and you'll get what you need to know."

Her resolve is already weakening; the bait that they're dangling in front of her nose is too tempting to refuse. Jane leans her hip against the edge of the table as she slowly picks up the folder. She deliberates a moment before she thumbs it open, curiosity overriding growing suspicion.

Everything in the folder is in triplicate and the stack of papers in there is thick enough to be a graduate dissertation. She takes her time reading clause after clause, slowly untangling the copious amounts of legalese to the best of her ability. By the time she reaches the end of the document, her eyes are watering with strain and all that really sticks in her mind are the dire consequences that await her should she ever speak a word of this to anyone else.

She's no stranger to confidentiality agreements. It is fairly often that she receives requests from anonymous, wealthy donors who specifically request – through unofficial channels – for priority treatment. For her silence and her personalised attention, there would be numerous personal benefits, many of which are obscenely generous. The temptation is to take them up on their offers lurks perpetually in the shadow of every dark corner that breaks the monotonous linearity of the whitewashed hospital walls.

Jane shakes her head once, willing that stray thought away. She takes a moment to stare out the window, allowing herself a moment for her unspoken thoughts to run wild. She's under no illusions that there'll scarcely be enough time to say her hurried goodbyes to Sigrid and a few colleagues who have become friends.

But the patient who is waiting for her at the other end…who is he that S.H.I.E.L.D. had seen fit to send special task force agents just to bring her into their ranks?

"We appreciate your cooperation, Dr. Foster. After you've signed the requisite permissions, all you'll need to know is-" he pauses and slides a green file onto the table, next to the non-disclosure agreement forms, "-over here."

The agent's demeanour is bland and pleasant, but she detects some smugness beneath it. This is, to him, as good as a done deal, a presumption that is also, unfortunately quite true. And they both know it.

She wonders if they patiently hunt down everyone whom they find suitable to further their shady causes and hold prettily-decorated carrots on a stick in front of their noses until the potential of obtaining a negative answer becomes an irrelevant memory.

There have been stories of course. There always are. Told by a friend of a friend, in the days when she'd still been a newbie. Each _interesting_ case that had graced the reception desk of the public hospital to which she'd been attached was accompanied by the spectral presence of men in black and wary looks among the staff.

Jane also knows that no one contacted by S.H.I.E.L.D. ever says no, for a variety of reasons that are always less than altruistic. And especially not if creative cajoling comes into play.

The naturally conspiratorial air of intrigue that the agent carts around in abundance is whittling away her wariness, leaving her natural inquisitive self grasping at the mystery of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s patient. It's all in that folder, lying just a centimetre out of her reach – a bridgeable distance, should she put pen to paper. Her own work in the hospital is admittedly experimental; Jane isn't too much of an ostrich with her head in the sand not to be privy to pointed conversations that more than hint at the _shamanistic_ methods she's employing with her patients.

To work on a classified case with the technology that she'd developed would be sufficient, personal validation of her work in the neurological field, even though her official results might never really see the light of day in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s secret facility.

But to drop everything and leave her responsibilities to the other doctors even for a temporary period…

A part of her is ashamed to admit that she hadn't felt such deep-seated excitement in years.

A roommate that she had as a medical student once cheekily commented that a certain…_dionysian_ impulse could never be separated from the person of Jane Foster. Back then, she had surreptitiously looked up the meaning of that word in the dictionary, gotten herself horrified at its implications and had proceeded to do everything to disprove that casual-but-not-forgotten statement in the months and years to come.

There is more than a grain of truth in that observation, as Jane had learnt to acknowledge with no small amount of chagrin. The virtual machine that is her brainchild and lifeline today had been created out of the feverish flux of dreams and hypotheses that were tossed out of respected academic circles for years, developed out of scrap materials in her dorm's backyard and re-fashioned into its final form in a medical facility when a generous grant had – against all hopes – materialised on a cold winter's day.

Jane digs out a pen from the pocket of her lab coat as anticipation builds into a tingling throb that amplifies her heartbeat in her ears. The pressure of her bold, unremitting strokes across the document's dotted line is so great that it rips the first sheet straight through.

Then she reaches for the file.

**oOo**

Jane had asked for three days.

Seventy-two hours to be exact, from the time the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents had stepped out of the hospital to the time they were supposed to collect her and relocate her to wherever she needs to be. Instead, they'd come in forty-eight hours, exactly a day earlier than what was agreed upon, and found her still throwing random articles of clothing into a suitcase that wouldn't close.

Their excessive enthusiasm had been inversely proportional to her good humour. An extra hour of belligerent negotiation on her part had left her nerves more frazzled than ever but bought her at least an additional six hours to finish her errands.

She blows a lock of stray hair out of her eyes and takes another look around, her gaze inadvertently falling on the large telescope that takes up half the valuable space in her tiny bedroom. A fork in the road many years ago could have gotten her down the road to Astrophysics and her only real financial indulgence when she'd finally obtained her medical degree hadn't been an apartment but a large, and very-professional-looking telescope that had wiped an obscene amount out of her savings. She hadn't exactly looked back since, even though the experience of looking at the stars is now confined to the small lens of her telescope.

The stars will always be her obsession in one form or another.

The bulky telescope will go wherever she goes and she'll be damned if she allows the relocation company to even touch its tattered box.

Jane picks up the phone and starts saying her goodbyes to the people who deserve better than to hear of her departure through the office grapevine. The conversations are at times trite but always courteous and at times, too long for her liking.

They leave her more exhausted than she thought she'd be.

When S.H.I.E.L.D.'s agents return in their SUVs six hours later, she's finally ready to leave.

**oOo**

Escorted by men in black with wearing clichéd aviator shades, Jane walks up the ramp of hulking C-17 parked on the airstrip and is immediately shown the passenger room and her temporary quarters for the duration of the flight. The crew leave her to her own devices but Jane is perfectly fine with it.

Dumping her duffel on the bunk, she's surprised at the elegance of the interior of the modified military cargo aircraft and even more stumped at the strong wireless signal that her phone picks up and announces in a series of chirps.

Do all their employees enjoy such luxury, with no expenses spared?

She knows that her bemusement hasn't faded yet and is unlikely to do so until she settles in and starts work on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s mysterious patient. Then she straps in, listens to the roar of the engines prepping for take-off and allows her mind to drift until the craft levels out.

Only when the safety lights blink out does she whip out the file that the agent had left her that day immediately. She scans through the information given the umpteenth time and slams the binder shut in frustration.

The anonymous patient's profile is as good as a dummy case study found in the morgue, handed out to squeamish first-year medical students. Jane is curtly told that he is a condemned criminal with the blood of dozens on his hands. It doesn't matter that S.H.I.E.L.D.'s only tenuous claim to this bold conclusion is the presence of matching blood types found on his headless victims scattered throughout the globe. Nor does it matter that she can think of a dozen reasons why that particularly skewed conclusion is not necessarily a logical consequence of its premise.

They're just doing their job, just as they'll expect her to do hers with no questions asked.

There are no accompanying photos of the patient's condition. Instead, there are only clinical reports, charts and graphs cataloguing his numerous injuries sustained and the corresponding treatments administered to keep him alive – long enough for S.H.I.E.L.D. to conduct their interrogation.

Her only job, as she'd found out, is to plumb her patient's mind for any sort of information that will help S.H.I.E.L.D. in their investigations. To generate new leads, to run down any loose ends that they might have missed, through the use of her virtual machines.

Every other detail is superfluous, revealed on a need-to-know basis, should someone see fit to relay her with it. In short, the information that has been provided for her is as incomplete as her last meal a few hours ago.

That the case offers her the chance of delving into a killer's mind makes her simultaneously nervous and uneasy. Yet, that she knows so few tantalising details about him adds to the allure of treating him, despite knowing that he is a dangerous man who is at present, incapacitated and seriously ill.

If the practice of medicine is fraught with emotion, the detached concern with which she'd been taught to employ with her patients is a battle that she fights daily. Every plunge that she takes into her patients' sub-conscious memories narrows the professional distance that lies between doctor and patient.

It had taken a week for the roiling nausea to fade after her first case with a catatonic woman who, by all outward appearances, resembled a petite small-town pre-school teacher whose thoughts had been anything but an emotionless void. It had taken a few more patients and several nightmares later for her to realise that the invisible entities – wants, desires, hopes – housed on the inside were the most terrifying elements to confront in this field of work.

But to walk in the fantasy world of a killer…would it come with a price she cannot pay?

It's this worrying question that sticks in her head as the C-17 banks left and begins its slow descent over a vast outcropping of rock.

**oOo**

The journey from the airstrip to the facility passes in a significant blur.

Jane remembers being ushered into yet another black SUV that had already been waiting at the tarmac and shuttled through acres of farmland and temperate forests. She remembers breathing the air that is heavier all around her, remembers being weighed down by moisture that signals an inevitable downpour.

Alone in the backseat, Jane clutches her duffel closer and tries to relax. It's an impossible task.

She checks her watch frequently and wonders what time zone she's in, then decides to get all the details right when she's finally settled in. Her attempt to engage the driver in small talk fails miserably when all she gets are non-committal grunts from a man who knows better than to say anything to her. Heaving a sigh of annoyance when her latest question falls flat, Jane wonders if the prisoner's doctor is regarded as suspiciously as the prisoner himself.

At the half-hour mark, they take a sharp bend on to a gravel road. The road is bumpy and uneven, the crunch of the gravel strangely loud even in the unnatural silence of the interior, jolting her out of the thoughtful lull that had she'd fallen into sometime after they left the airport.

A quick glance outside tells her that the car had just gone off the official road and onto a minor, unmarked one. The trees seem to press in closer, their broad canopies shrinking the narrow width of the dirt track into a thin, trespassing strip of land that cuts defiantly into an impenetrable forest. Then the SUV picks up speed, gravel spraying the tinted windows. At one point, it veers particularly close to the foliage, causing a cluster of birds to burst from the canopy of a tall tree.

They roll to a halt another fifteen minutes later in front of a large, white facility that starkly is out of place in the untouched wilderness. The actual complex lies at least five hundred yards from the double fences that make up its perimeter, its only entrance and exit being the small, automatic gate opens up into a driveway that leads straight to large double doors.

Two agents, dressed in black leather, wait at the doors as Jane climbs out of the car. Two of Earth's own Avengers, she realises, recalling the scant news articles that she'd read about them.

Romanov and Barton.

"Dr. Foster?" Barton takes her duffel and intones unsmilingly as he stretches out a hand in greeting. "Please follow us."

No preliminaries, just the minimal amount of politeness. Works for her.

Jane takes the proffered hand and gives him a practised smile of acknowledgement that she reserves for difficult colleagues and patients. There's no small talk as they make their way through the maze of corridors, for which she's grateful. The silence gives her the chance to observe the utilitarian, sterile environment that looks like a cross between a research facility and a high-security prison compound.

Everything is steel, grit, concrete and white walls. Functionality over form.

Barton and Romanov stop in front of a grey door labelled '15b'.

"This is the quarters of all our medical residents," Barton says and steps aside.

The door swings open after authenticating both agents' fingerprints and retinal patterns, revealing an interior which is only a slight an aesthetic improvement from what she has seen of its exterior.

A double bed, a large workstation, a closet and an attached bathroom with view of the facility's double perimeter fencing.

Jane quirks an eyebrow at the sparse but functional furnishings. It seems as though this mantra bleeds into every aspect of its mission, from the facility's architecture to its agents' patterns of speech.

But right now, there's a more important matter that she needs to attend to.

"Thank you. I'd like to have a look at my patient," she tells them firmly.

Romanov and Barton exchange a wordless glance. After half a second's hesitation, the redhead nods and leads the way out of her quarters and into a different corridor that snakes away from the main complex that they had entered. They lead her across the underground compound into a different building that is just as nondescript as the rest of the complex.

Just ten minutes into this place and the disorientation comes as an indistinct cloud of lines and corridors that merge towards a vanishing point.

As though sensing her confusion, Romanov turns around without breaking stride and tells her, "You'll get used to it in about a week."

Jane hopes so too.

**oOo**

She's led into a room that is barely half the size of her own quarters. The door slamming shut behind her barely registers when Jane finally takes a look at the mysterious patient who had, up until that point, been a collection of charts and sentences on thick sheets of paper.

The sophisticated array of machines that will keep a man alive lines half the windowless wall, the only source of sound in the silence.

The dim light casts perpetual long shadows on Mr. X's pale face. The portion of black hair that isn't caught up in bandages is stark and bunched up on the white pillowcase, highlighting the sharp angles of his prominent cheekbones and jaw even through the bruises that mar his smooth skin. Beneath the injuries and the gauntness that comes from an extended time spent in a medical ward, Jane is unprepared for the otherworldly perfection of his thin form which houses such murderous instincts.

She blinks once, feeling an unease that has nothing and everything to do with the strange, crawling sensation that seems to skim the walls of this place. Her skin is suddenly tingling, reacting to a curious prickling feel that seems to permeate the cool, scrubbed air, her nose detecting a faint hint of pine and exotic oriental spice. It is gone as soon as she tries to put a name to it, leaving the vestiges of antiseptic lotion and bleach that hadn't been there before.

_He's just a man, Jane_, she tells herself. A killer, in fact, to be more precise.

_Get a grip._

Jane takes an involuntary step back and frowns as she keeps her eyes on the unmoving patient. His chest rises and falls steadily and a quick glance at the heart rate monitor offers sufficient proof that things hadn't been any different ten seconds ago.

Taking a deep breath, she picks up the chart that's at the foot of his bed and starts reading.


	3. Chapter 3

_A/N: Sorry for the delay in updates. Real life intrudes, as always and it's hard to find time to write!_

**Chapter 2**

The scent of rain is in the air, accompanied by the sudden rush of euphoria so out of place that it jerks her awake. Clarity only sets in as her eyes register the weak sunlight that shafts through the small opening in the curtain, a minute before the alarm clock announces its presence.

Jane kicks off the bed covers with a frown and stumbles dazedly into the bathroom, blinking away the strange floating sensations that seem to have spilled over from that twilit, irrational realm.

_What had brought that on? _

Logic, as always, tells her in a voice that resembles her supervisor, that exhaustion and adaptation have taken their toll on her body and her mind. Deep-seated intuition, honed from years of allowing her imagination roam free each time her telescope is pointed at the sky, tells her that her encounter with her mystery patient has everything to do with it.

Or does it?

By the time she gets out, there's a slight drizzle in the air that chills the temperature indoors. It blows sideways against the windowpane, succumbing to the force of the harsh winds that whip their way through the pine forest. The sound is like thunder, even with the windows firmly shut.

A sharp knock on her door startles her out of her reverie. Jane jumps a little, cursing loudly as her knee jerks into the sharp edge of the counter, and realises with some chagrin that she's clutching her towel in a death grip as she stares sightlessly into a mirror that's still fogged up from the steam of her recent shower. She gets dressed with a grimace and yanks open the door, only to see a huge pile of boxes that the courier had left outside her room.

They're positioned exactly such that her only route out into the corridor is blocked, leaving her no choice but to sort them out one by one before she can actually leave the place for some semblance of sustenance. The gloomy weather already forgotten, Jane snorts at how wonderfully considerate S.H.I.E.L.D movers have proven themselves to be.

An hour later, slightly sweaty and grumpy from her efforts to settle in, she finally steps out into the corridor in search of food. The oddity of only occupying herself with a sole patient hasn't yet sunk in and she's still undecided if the inordinate amount of time that she'll be spending on his treatment – an in close proximity to a serial killer – leaves her feeling queasy or darkly thrilled.

The hushed quietness that hangs over the whole compound is disconcerting, so unlike the constant stream of activity that bounces off the corridors of the hospital. It takes her a while to navigate her way down to the larger complex that houses her patient and it's only until her feet take her to the door of his cell instead of the canteen that she realises where she really is.

The patient lies unchanged from where he lay since she saw him yesterday, an unmoving, thin lump in the sheets and the mess of wires hooked up to him. No one knows his name so he's their Mr. X, their mystery to solve, their only clue to the string of murders that only implicates him as the perpetrator.

The only difference in the room today is the presence of her virtual computers and the elevated surfaces that she normally uses during a session with a patient.

Jane still fails to fully understand S.H.I.E.L.D.'s intense interest in him. But it obviously isn't her place to know anything beyond plumbing the depths of his subconscious, she reminds herself caustically with a barely-suppressed roll of her eyes. Taking a step forward, she balks in surprise as she nears his bed.

The physical wounds that mar Mr. X's body are still present, but they somehow look lighter, less prominent against his pale skin. Scoffing slightly, she convinces herself that it's a trick of the lighting or even the sheer exhaustion of yesterday's move that must have made her see things that hadn't been there at all before.

A quiet knock – a soft sound of bones against wood – makes her turn to the door.

The man who enters is in a white doctor's coat thrown hastily over blue med scrubs. Another medical officer stands at the threshold of the cell, surprise flitting across his face, all too quickly replaced by a sanguine expression.

He stretches out a hand in greeting, which she takes immediately. Calls himself Trenton Corey, this doctor who'd been assigned to Mr. X before he put in a recommendation for her expertise. Jane finds him easy to like – though he seems a little cagey at times – mostly because of his genial bedside manner that people assume exists in general practitioners. The latter is probably an occupational hazard, given that he works in this cagey compound where secrets overflow out of its walls.

They talk trivia and she realises that it calms her down a little, this small, mundane anchor in the secluded world hemmed in by acres of wilderness and electrified fences.

She's finally shaking the last bits of tension off in her neck when the topic eventually and inevitably veers to the unconscious man on the bed. Sneaking a glance at him, Jane sees that Mr. X's breaths are deep and even, the oxygen mask over his face obscuring most of his features. Beneath it, his face is placid and unmoving. She can't shake the idea that everything they say here are things he can hear and understand. It's a belief that has only strengthened in the years that she had worked to prove that patients in vegetative states largely retain their cognitive abilities to varying degrees.

Jane suddenly finds herself gripping the ledge of the bed until her knuckles whiten.

"He was in a bad state when he was found. Cerebral contusions, severe internal bruising, broken ribs, cracked, femur fracture-", Corey says quietly and shakes his head, not mincing his words he lifts the clipboard from the foot of the bed.

He's oblivious to her sudden discomfort and she swallows hard as she wipes clammy hands on the sides of her jacket.

"Yeah, I've read that," Jane acknowledges.

"To be honest, the fact that he's still alive now is in itself a miracle. More resilient than any other patient I've come across in my years doing this. I've read about sheer willpower keeping a person alive, but this…" He trails off as though bewildered, at a loss for words. "We're probably looking at a very, very long road to recovery and that's still a very optimistic prognosis we can give him."

"Among…_us_? If there're other doctors here, I've not seen any of them besides you."

Corey laughs shortly. "A small team of medical advisors, residents and nurses, but it's not a permanent number. We come and go according to the terms stipulated in our contracts, but obviously we aren't supposed to discuss it among ourselves. The nurse who has been helping me with this case packed up yesterday."

Jane purses her lips when she hears that. "I see."

Corey shrugs once genially. "That's how it goes around here. Contracts aren't permanent but really, the employees themselves choose to move on to warmer climes, if you get my drift."

Jane nods in understanding. A few hours spent here is enough to convince her of Corey's 'drift'.

Then she takes the clipboard from him and rereads the details of Mr. X's condition. It's all that she knows of him – the man on the bed whose only identity is defined by the long list of injuries that he'd suffered. It occurs to her that they've been talking about Mr. X as a patient whose life is at stake, rather than a serial killer in need of medical help only because the authorities demand it.

But Corey isn't done. He walks over to check on the machines to see that they're functioning correctly – a useless task really, because they do – and then looks at her hesitantly.

"Look, I know everything about this is rather unusual," he continues as his eyes involuntarily wander to the cameras fixed in the corners of the cell.

Jane's gaze follows his, then wanders to the architecture and the interior design of the cell. It hits her then, that the room closely resembles a large interrogation cell, hastily transformed into a hospital ward.

Three walls are visible to the subject, while the fourth mirror-grade acrylic wall conceals the observation panel behind.

"-and I can't imagine that it has been easy to be here two days after I put in my recommendation but-"

"That's alright," she tells him, finally finding her voice. It's best to think of this hiatus as another assignment away from her usual place of work. Then she adds dryly, "For all this trouble, S.H.I.E.L.D. actually offered a lucrative deal."

The look that Corey gives her tells her all that she needs to know.

"Yeah, they certainly do, don't they?"

**oOo**

The computerised voice announces the completion of the neural lock between the splinter in her arm and in her temple but Jane is barely aware of it as she begins her drift into the hyper-vividness of a landscape that's too sharp, too bright to be real.

The neural interface materialises as a silky black glass sheet rippling tantalisingly beneath her feet and for the first time ever, she stumbles as though walking on water. The gust of wind reeks of ozone, as though produced by the lingering prickles of a lightning storm that have been ravaging the land for a very long time. She tilts her head upwards when she feels searing heat on the back of her neck, seeing the blood-red sun that quickly clips across the sky to dip beneath a rippling horizon of the jagged tips of rocks.

Then the ground bucks beneath her and turns into a flimsy, pearlescent net of sand that dissipates and crumbles beneath her weight. An unseen force hurls her into a sky of dotted with unfamiliar constellations and suddenly, Jane's sliding through a rocky pathway that spits her out onto the same black glass sheet that stretches out as far as she can see.

She's dazed by the immensity of Mr. X's landscape – a world really – shaken by the whirring and whispers that press in from nowhere. What she's seeing is so very unlike the domestic scenes of deserted farmhouses and impossibly high mountains and open oceans that exist in her other patients' subconscious selves.

"-ster…Dr. Foster!"

The screech of metal against metal thrusts her out of the deadly, surreal maze in the short snap of a millisecond. Darkness coalesces into a pinprick of light as reality harshly reasserts its presence. Blinking her eyes open blearily, Jane takes a moment to catch her breath, pushing out the shrill, insistent warning that's coming out as a staccato of loud beeps from the left of her cot. A metre above her, the low hum of the heavily modified, semi-circular MR scanner winds down to the buzz of white noise.

The sound is as familiar to her as the back of her hand; it's the alarm signalling that the inbuilt failsafe had triggered, terminating the connection between her and Mr. X when the crumbling neural link had begun to compromise functional processes in the brain.

But she hadn't even gone deep enough as she should be going. Deep enough so that she sees Mr. X's face – or at least the self he projects – in his own mind. And yet the link between them had already been corrupted by an experience too bizarre to explain even in medical terms.

"Dr. Foster!"

"I'm here," Jane croaks out.

Natasha Romanov's cool tones float out of the room speakers and Jane remembers with a grimace that she has an audience.

"Dr. Foster, your EEG readings are spiking through the chart."

If Romanov is present, perhaps Barton is too, and god knows who else is standing behind that hidden panel.

"Patient's blood pressure and heart rate slowly stabilising," Trenton Corey's voice calls out, distorted slightly by the static that buzzes through the speaker. "Dr. Foster, I could come over and-"

"I'm fine," she hastily reassures the people behind the one-way mirror. "I must have overestimated the frequencies. I'll just redo them again."

Her voice breaks towards the end as she listens to the strange hollow of vibration in her own parched throat. Biting back a groan, Jane sits up slowly on the bed that's set up for her next to Mr. X's own, trying to calm her choppy breathing. Next to the readings detailing neural stimuli and neurological responses, the digital clock blinks 1057 hours in large, red numbers.

Jane stares in disbelief. She'd spent nearly a whole hour in that bizarre place when it'd only felt like a few hair-raising seconds.

With a noisy exhale, she crosses the small space to look at the printouts of Mr. X's stats. Except for the elevated readings that his vitals had registered during their neural connection, he seems perfectly fine now.

"The patient's doing fine," she says more for Corey's benefit than for the S.H.I.E.L.D.'s agents.

Corey's own quiet sigh of relief is audible over the speakers. "You gave us quite a bit of a scare there."

"You and me both, pal," Jane mutters to herself as she rechecks the parameters and the values of the variables on the touchscreen's control panel, keenly feeling the spotlight of attention like a tangible weight pressing insistently into her back. "No pressure at all, Jane."

And she'd thought that this would be relatively stress-free? She'd kick herself later.

The low whine of the machines fills the empty space as she adjusts the strength settings of the neural link on the touchscreen. It glows red, recalculating its imaging parameters as the progress bar rapidly fills up in the corner and snaps her new settings into place. She deliberates a moment, then boosts the level of neurotransmitters in the fluids that run through both her and Mr. X's veins.

"Setting the timer for their connection to last two hours," she says to the observation panel unnecessarily.

A hundred and twenty minutes.

It's an arbitrary figure dependent on the whims of Mr. X's overactive psyche.

"I'm trying one more time," Jane announces out loud as she lies back down on her cot and takes a deep breath.

_Down the rabbit hole._

"Go ahead, Dr. Foster," a new voice replies.

It sounds like Clint Barton, but Jane can't be too sure, because she's already plunging headfirst into the abyss.

**oOo**

The darkness is comforting and painless and it keeps the nightmares at bay, an unmoveable barrier that stops the horror from leaking into his head the insidious way it did the moment Midgard had beckoned an age ago.

Dimly, Loki thinks that he is aware of the pain that still lances his side, but he's drifting out of it easily, floating on the feather-light feeling that cushions everything.

A bright flash of light lances through the black emptiness, thrusting his disoriented self into a memory that harks back many years. Whether it is borne out of the illusive nature of the darkness or of the making of his own mind, he doesn't know. Nor does he have the strength to find out.

If this is truly a dream, Loki thinks that he'll be quite happy to stay in it for an indeterminate period of time.

In his peripheral vision, a slight brunette stands looking at everything that swirls around her. But she doesn't seem to see him. There's a look of awe and wonder on her face as she stumbles and rights herself, an incongruous stain violating this space that he owns. She is dressed in Midgardian garments, the sort that he has become familiar with in his time on Midgard, covered with a long, white coat that hangs to her knees.

He blinks once and she's gone, reappearing a second later as a spectral figure who stumbles in that same black nothingness of glass, sand and fire.

Somehow he knows that she stands at the threshold of his memories, at the shorefront of the ocean of his deepest fears and unspoken desires. The ground is suddenly an undulating snake, as though sensing his confusion and turmoil at her unwelcome presence.

Loki tenses, not liking the sudden intrusion.

With a slight motion of his fingers, he pushes her off the edge of his consciousness and straight into a pathway that is deliberately fashioned as a maze in which she'd get perpetually lost. He feels the heavy weight of his own breath roaring in his ears but also every infinitesimal shift of movement that she makes as she struggles to hold herself upright.

It's a losing battle that she fights. There isn't much more to do except to watch her wink in and out of focus until she disappears completely.

Loki smiles in satisfaction at his handiwork when the pathway ejects her somewhere that's out of sight – and out of mind. Only then does he turn his attention to the domed horizon that slowly cracks open on his right.

The soft, golden light he'd always associated with home dissipates like the morning fog into the familiar spires that inch towards the magnificent sprawl of the stars. With a start, he realises it's the view from the balcony in his personal chambers: the grassy training area that lies the right, and skirting that octagonal field, Frigga's perfumed gardens that follow the coast of the great sea; the gilded apple trees of Idunn shimmering in the distance as they consume the light of the stars.

It's real and yet it is not. Loki wonders if it's a construct of his addled mind.

A dark whisper caresses his wind-bitten cheeks and he knows that the chill he feels is the most tangible of emotions as he floats in a realm between worlds.

_Thanos._

The faceless name that rides on that wave of confusion is too familiar, a stain in these hallowed spaces. Instinct makes him flinch in anticipation of tortuous pain but none comes. Instead, there's a void where emotion and sensation reside.

And then he's running, away from the fear and the burn of ice, his footsteps light yet heavy in nothingness, away from the terror that he's ashamed of feeling. To his horror, his strides start to slow, as though he has transitioned from running on air to trudging through the heavy black dirt of Svartalfheim and the thick mud that blankets most of Nidavellir.

The void is an endless circle that runs him ragged.

But where he expects the hollowed out feeling of nothingness, Loki sees instead – with no little amount of shock and annoyance – that same, short, brown-haired woman back in this place he isn't even sure is real.

The surroundings shift again, as though sensing his mood. Shadows meld into the symmetric structures of a plain, empty room where four walls create a claustrophobic space to hem them both in.

There's no hesitation this time when he strides up to her to clamp a hard hand around her neck, positioning himself so that she stays immobile in his grasp.

"Name yourself, fiend," he commands through gritted teeth, taking in the growing panic and terror in her eyes. "Tell me your business in this place."

She's shaking her head in either denial or fear – or maybe both – as he shakes her slightly and repeats his question.

"Uh-I-"

Loki loosens his grip on her throat fractionally, hearing her gasps and wheezes turn into audible sounds.

"Name yourself."

He watches as the woman takes a deep breath and works her throat. "J-Jane. Foster."

"Jane Foster," Loki repeats blankly, his brow furrowing as he searches for something with which to associate that particular name. It would be so easy to snap her neck. A short, easy death. But even that act would be considered a small mercy. Yet it's inexplicable that there is someone here in this place that is quickly becoming his personal nightmare – a woman who looks like she is incapable of doing the smallest creature any harm.

Unless…unless she is yet another one whom he must kill, another insidious, stinking minion couched in the disguise of humanity designed to drive him to madness. And even in this world between worlds, he cannot escape them.

He shoves aside the thread of despair that threatens to halt the magic that's spiking in his core and focuses instead on the woman whose insistent presence cannot be shaken off.

"Your name means nothing to me. Do not even attempt to deny that you are one of them," he intones with an unpleasant smile.

She finally finds her voice. "One of them?"

The clarity that he thought he'd gained out of that chaos is short-lived. "Are you truly incapable of comprehending my statement?"

Loki murmurs the question harshly into her face, his jaw tightening in impatience and annoyance. But it occurs to him as soon as his question is voiced, that Jane Foster's unlikely existence and appearance in this realm suggest that even the boundaries of magic and consciousness are not as concretely fixed as he'd once assumed.

"No, look, I can help yo-"

Riding only on instinct, Loki doesn't bother to wait for her to finish that sentence as he reaches inward to take hold of the threads that are holding up this illusion…and _pulls_.

Like a dam that caves in, everything of hers quickly saturates the haze of his consciousness, the sharp, crisp flash of her personal memories so overwhelming that the shock of its fullness instantly severs the magical hold he has of her mind.

There is no chronological order is the scenes of her life, merely echoes of memories in bright colours that cannot simply be dismissed by a magical gesture. They are too full of life, too emotional to be carried in the mortal frames of the non-entities he hunts.

If Jane Foster is truly one of them, then all he'd find would be a nonentity of dust and bones, with no significant spark of animated sentience that could ever react with the magic that he has stretched out with.

Loki jerks back with a start, his mouth as dry as dust as he stares at the red fingerprints that have been permanently burned into the stark, pristine white walls. His own. Bloodied with the kills that he'd made.

"Who are you?"

The words are tumbling out of their own accord, spoken in a voice hoarse with disbelief as the room around them crumbles. This is his mind laid out in a land of contradictions and memories – private but not inviolable – and so attuned to the shift of his emotions that the walls are flattening just as his gut clenches in dread and realisation.

Before Jane Foster can answer, the floor beneath them falls through completely. The squealing noise reduces the room into a one-dimensional flat line as he shifts his hand from her throat to grip her wrist to call his knives to him-

The sheer compression of space and time forcibly breaks this tenuous connection and the last thing Loki feels is the dagger's sharp point digging hard into his hand where hers used to be.

**oOo**

"I'm pretty sure that's what I saw."

Jane rubs at her eyes tiredly. The hour is late and all she wants to do is to hit the bed hard. Judging from the glacial pace of this meeting, it doesn't even look as though the end is anywhere in sight.

Her encountered in Mr. X's Wonderland – as the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents have taken to calling it – had been taken apart, put together and pulled to bits so many times that it's starting to confuse her as well. Throw in the theories of psychoanalysis, pseudo-Freudian and Jungian readings and she's ready to bolt.

"For a whole two hours?" Clint Barton grunts out, his fingers tapping out an unknown rhythm on the wood table.

Jane hears the disbelief in Barton's voice all too clearly.

"Yes," she insists sharply, "Time has no meaning when I'm under."

"But you spoke to him."

"He was disoriented and asked for my name."

"Why did you give it?"

Her sigh is loud enough so that everyone knows what she already thinks of Barton's repetitive line of questioning. They're going in circles and she has already forgotten how many times she'd paraphrased her answer. But now, this meeting feels more like an interrogation than a sitrep that it's supposed to be.

In other circumstances, Jane might have found herself cowering. But the force behind Barton's glare pales in comparison to the shock she'd felt when that cold hand had wrapped itself around her neck Jane finds that she's able to meets Barton's eyes with an unwavering stare of her own rather easily.

"Because I need my patients to trust me."

Her response isn't too much of a hedge, really. Yes, Mr. X's murderous instincts had shown up in a rather spectacular fashion. And he'd looked ready to take her out as his next victim if not for the timely intervention of a crumbling floor. She's thankful that all of it had happened in a virtual world. There hadn't been any time for her to decompress or analyse the events of that first – and eventful – session with Mr. X before Barton and Romanov whisked her out of the cell and into a conference room where she'd spent the last three-and-a-half hours.

Jane doesn't tell them that there had been fear and terror, not when they're looking at her as though she's the only one with the answers to the riddle of the comatose man in that solitary cell. Or that she suspected he has shown himself capable enough of throwing them both out of the neural connection with his manipulations. Neither does she really say that Mr. X had been clad in black and green medieval-looking armour, complete with a green cape and a horned helmet, speaking like a delusional man who's lost in time.

There has to be a load of explanations for his strange get-up. Maybe he's big on cosplay. Sews his own costume. Fashions an alternate identity for himself that over time, he manages to fool himself into believing that's who he is. Feet no longer planted in the real world, making it easy to go down the slippery slope into…_murder_?

Jane gives herself an inward shake. It's still too soon to play the insanity card.

Natasha Romanov gives Barton a pointed look then turns to her. "Dr. Foster, I know this has been a long, hard day and what you've done seems promising. We're just trying to get our facts straight," she says calmly.

Too calmly for Jane's liking.

"Look, I understand that S.H.I.E.L.D. has staked a lot in this whole procedure. But the mind is a funny place to explore. The fact of the matter is, the experimental nature of this technology makes it more of an art than a science. I'm making small headway, but it's still headway. Each time I go under, I'll need to work towards getting him to trust me, to talk to me. But if the connection in any way endangers his life, this-"

"Let's hope that it won't come to that," Romanov interrupts smoothly.

Jane knows as well as anyone else in the room, that it could and probably would. Instead, she says nothing.

Barton purses his lips until they are nothing but a thin line across his face.

"Understood, Dr. Foster."

Even the short burst of triumph that Jane feels is eclipsed by fatigue. She nods once, stiffly.

"I'll get the official report to you by the end of the day."


End file.
